Chinese Characters

A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and formerly Vietnamese. Its possible precursors appeared as early as 8000 years ago, and a complete writing system in Chinese characters was developed 3500 years ago in China, making it perhaps the oldest surviving writing system.

4% of Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms, and in most of those cases the relationship is not necessarily clear to the modern reader. The other 96% are logical aggregates, which are characters combined from multiple parts indicative of meaning, and pictophonetics, characters containing two parts where one indicating a general category of meaning and the other the sound, though the sound is often only approximate to the modern pronunciation because of changes over time and differences between source languages. The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history. In China, literacy for the working citizen is defined as knowledge of 2,000 characters.

In Chinese tradition, each character corresponds to a single syllable. Most words in all modern varieties of Chinese are polysyllabic and thus require two or more characters to write. Cognates in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations are written with the same character. In addition, many characters were adopted according to their meaning by the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether. The loose relationship between phonetics and characters has thus made it possible for them to be used to write very different and probably unrelated languages.

Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters occupy a more or less square area. Characters made up of multiple parts squash these parts together in order to maintain a uniform size and shape — this is the case especially with characters written in the Sòngtǐ style. Because of this, beginners often practise on squared graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes use the term "Square-Block Characters".

The actual shape of many Chinese characters varies in different cultures. Mainland China adopted simplified characters in 1956, but Traditional Chinese characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Japan has used its own less drastically simplified characters since 1946, while Korea has limited the use of Chinese characters, and Vietnam completely abolished their use in favour of romanized Vietnamese.

Chinese characters are also known as sinographs, and the Chinese writing system as sinography. Non-Chinese languages which have adopted sinography - and, with the orthography, a large number of loanwords from the Chinese language - are known as Sinoxenic, whether or not they still use the characters. The term does not imply any genetic affiliation with Chinese. The major Sinoxenic languages are generally considered to be Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.